Fear of Flooding - UPDATE
Are you a due process or a finality kind of guy?The question came from a judge. We'd just met. He knew nothing about me except that I was licensed to practice law. He was cutting, as they say (and,...
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A Corrections Officer Ain't No Ham Sandwich
The idea is that the grand jury is a check on prosecutorial abuse. You get a bunch of citizens who scrutinize the prosecutor's evidence, challenge it even, and decide whether there's probable cause to...
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It's an Accusation So It Must Be True
There is one and only one piece of evidence that it was Danny Brown who raped and murdered Bobbie Russell in December 1981. Her son, Jeffery, six-years old at the time, said it was. Danny spent 19...
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Because It's Their Job To Beat Up the Prisoners
Indulge me in a thought experiment.Imagine that you’re an inmate at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York. That’s the maximum security prison from which Richard Matt and David Sweat...
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Like and Unlike - Sandy and the Notorious RBG
I like to call it "The Case I Almost Won in the Supreme Court.""Almost won" is, of course, an awful lot like lost, except maybe it sounds better. Sigh.Here's what happened. No votes to grant cert,...
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Hands in the Air or I'll Attach These Pieces of Paper
Gabriel Reveron, a deputy sheriff in Polk County, Florida, shot and killed Dominic Fuller.Ho hum. Shit happens.Besides, Fuller was a bad guy. The Sheriff's office says so. Stephanie Allen, in the...
View ArticleThe Spoken Postulation of His Unheard Presence
In a post at Fault Lines this morning (probably yesterday morning by the time anyone reads this), I wrote about some of the arbitrariness and and hypocrisy of the death penalty as practiced in the US...
View ArticleBlasts from the Past
As I mentioned before, I've been posting over at Fault Lines, a really terrific group blawg written by an ever expanding stable of lawyers with at least somewhat different perspectives.The down side,...
View ArticleJamaican Blue Mountain - or That Stuff in the Cardboard Cup at the...
Completely not what I normally write here.There are few things in this world I love more than coffee. Per what is supposedly an old Turkish proverb, coffee should be black as hell, strong as death,...
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Meet the Press
It was in a section about "journalism," and they called it "When Photographs Become Evidence." Clearly, the Times (and writer Niko Koppel) thought it was about the power of the photograph to tell the...
View ArticleThreePeat
When all you have is a hammer, they say, everything looks like a nail.And one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.Thing is, Tim McGinty's not...
View ArticleConstituional, Smonstitutional. Get on with It.
Doctor, when the cast comes off, will I be able to play the violin?Of course, there's no reason you can't.Great. I never could before.Which might be the story of California's death penalty. Enacted...
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For Your Own Good - UPDATE
Perhaps they meant well.But the road to hell is, you'll recall, paved with good intentions.And seriously. I mean, I want to put this as gently as I can.WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING? AND STILL...
View ArticleKillers By Any Other Name
Stephen Castle in the Times.A knife attack in a London subway station on Saturday was being treated as a “terrorist incident,” the police said after they arrested a 29-year-old man suspected of the...
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Abbot & Costello Meet Findlay Municipal Court
This is the story of Fengxiao Tao, who was not driving the car in Findlay, Ohio that September day in 2012.* It's the story of Fengxian Tao who was not charged with operating under the influence. And...
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Wherein I Resist the Temptation To Discuss the Chlamydia Incident
He had me at nitwits.Jay Wexler is a lawprof at BU, author of The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of Its Most Curious Provisions (a terrific book I reviewed here) and Holy...
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Happy New Year?
It's 2016.Around the world, folks celebrated the new year.In SydneyIn MoscowIn Dubai In LondonIn New YorkOf course, it wasn't all fireworks. Some places had their own customs.In Saudi Arabia Ben...
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Severe and Comfortless and Beautiful
My sister spent the last few weeks of her life in a hospice unit in a busy urban hospital.The staff were friendly enough, and they did what they could to make her comfortable and ease her physical...
View ArticleBreaking News: Sun Rises in East
The headline in the Columbus Dispatch caught my eye.Study finds racial, gender bias in Ohio executionsI mean, damn. I'd figured that Ohio (the state that round at the ends and stoned in the middle)...
View ArticlePut $284,000 in Small Unmarked Bills in a Paper Bag and Leave It Under the...
It must be nice to have a slush fund. Or you could think of it as not-so-petty cash.Turns out that Missouri pays cash for executions. Chris McDaniel for Buzzfeed news:Shortly before each execution in...
View ArticleTe Deum
A friend sent a group of us a poem, "Te Deum" by Charles Reznicoff.Not because of victoriesI sing, having none, but for the common sunshine, the breeze, the largess of the spring.Not for victory but...
View ArticleNot a Eulogy - a Reminder
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if...
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A Modest Proposal
No, not Jonathan Swift's. But you can draw your own conclusions.Antonin Scalia, that's Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia, is dead. He has, as John Cleese pointed out (albeit in a...
View Article26 and Counting
To what end, exactly?That's the question Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer asks today. Actually, that's my phrasing. What Justice Pfeifer said is. The act begs the question: Why?The "act" was...
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